I haven't used a deskjet in years, but recently acquired one for my
Debian box. The black ink seems to be a problem, smearing, skipping, etc.

I seem to remember from back in my Windows days there were some tools in
the "Toolbox" to do such things as align the ink cartridges or clean
them. Is there such a means in Debian to accomplish this? I'm pretty
illiterate when it comes to printing in Debian; I've managed to install
cupsys and foomatic-filters-ppds and configure the printer via Moz at
"localhost:631", but there's not anything I see there for cleaning the
cartridge.

What brand printer is it? I know someone has written a tool for the Epson
family of printers that will do that, but I am not sure about the others.